The gallery is pleased to announce that Federico Solmi will be included in Everything is Art, Everything is Politics curated by Elga Wimmer and Berta Sichel as an online exhibition. Appropriately curated during the 2020 election, this work features artists grappling with social and political motifs within their practice. In particular, artists who have had the politcal turn personal with how their work has been viewed by onlookers.
"Federico Solmi, was banned from the art fair in Bologna for daring to portray the fictional Pope Urban the LXX in his work The Evil Empire. His Pope embraces the darkest tendencies of the 21st Century, indulging all of his vices and impulses to no end. There is some hope for the viewer, however, as he is punished and sent for repentance to what looks like Dante’s Inferno. Of course, in Italy, the Pope is still untouchable, even in art. Solmi’s perfect drawings depict despots and tyrants (see The Loving Despots), from past and present, as comic figures, akin to merry-go-round cartoonish characters in a comedy of the absurd. Much like Francisco de Goya, the cartoonish and exaggerated depiction of the social and political agenda is presented in perfectly executed drawings and paintings, adding more recently video paintings (as The Machiavellian Ones). Both artists, in their own way, employ extreme satire to critique the corruption of figures of power across cultural, financial, governmental and religious institutions. Solmi’s satirical aesthetic portrays a dystopian vision of our present-day society."